"Bad anatomy? What bad anatomy?"

Two distinct-but-related issues affect the bad anatomy tag, as well as the related tags bad proportions and anatomical nonsense.

Ambiguity

The first issue is that bad anatomy is not always obvious. Optical illusion can hide even major goofs, yet it's only very rarely that taggers leave comments explaining what it is that's so anatomically nonsensical about an image.

Subjectivity

The second issue is that these tags sometimes seem to get subjectively applied to what is clearly intended as deliberate stylistic exaggeration:

• post #3846168
• post #3936056
• post #3597249
• post #3880271

I say "seem" because there may be things I'm not noticing in these—see the first issue—but the most obviously unrealistic features in all of these images are the girls' three sizes, so in the absence of any explanatory comment I can only assume that it's those proportions that are supposed to be bad.

I think taggers should at least be encouraged to leave comments explaining what bits of a character's anatomy are supposed to be bad. The tags themselves could also probably use a slight redefinition. anatomical nonsense currently seems to mean "bad anatomy but even more worser!" which is, to say the least, a pretty subjective distinction. I can see value in the tag for things like post #3302817, post #2661992, and post #3155822, but these seem sufficiently different in kind from regular bad anatomy that the implication doesn't hold.

It might be worth noting that three of those four examples were given those tags by the same person. Though brief, they seem to have a history of adding those tags to those kinds of posts.

Regardless, I agree with requesting an explanation from taggers for adding them. Way too many times I've been unable to figure out what those tags are referring to, even artist friends often not being very sure. I doubt we'd ever be able to enforce that, though. Even posting a comment asking about it usually doesn't get a response.

I've never liked anatomical nonsense, at least in how it's used. It makes sense for really crazy anatomy, but if we really need a tag for anatomy that's just extra bad, why not just make very bad anatomy? Plenty of things that get tagged anatomical nonsense aren't even much worse than any of the things that don't get tagged with it.

Honestly, looking through bad proportions, bad anatomy, and anatomical nonsense, those tags are just a mess, and outside of the most obvious offenders I can't tell what's actually wrong with at least half of the posts under them. The tags don't account for stylistic choices at all, and plenty of franchises should definitely get the tags a lot but don't because that's just the style of the anime.

I doubt we'd ever be able to enforce that, though. Even posting a comment asking about it usually doesn't get a response.

I think "we will remove this tag if it is at all unclear what you mean by it" should be enforcement enough. If not, "repeat offenders will be disciplined for tag vandalism" should do. We can tell who's been adding the tag with a simple Post History search.

It might be worth noting that three of those four examples were given those tags by the same person. Though brief, they seem to have a history of adding those tags to those kinds of posts.

Looking through that user's history, it turns out that they also tagged a post which I considered including in my examples, but decided against it because it did start to look a little weird (although not quite nonsensical) after I stared at it for several minutes (post #3863704).

It could also be a pool since it seems to be subjective. I'd personally just remove it, i've seen more complaints about the tag than else, and a pool would give more attention to a post being marked as bad anatomy, which doesn't help Danbooru's "elitist" reputation.

I was thinking, how about we make those tags APPROVERs only? Those tags might be added by users who is given privilege to approve posts.

This reminds me of the poorly drawn tag which got nuked outta topic #13153.

EDIT: I recently read about the Upload Rules where the tag anatomical nonsense might be applied to images with extreme "hyper" fetish images like post #3846168 to warn Approvers, since it's a borderline content.

Travley said:

I was thinking, how about we make those tags APPROVERs only? Those tags might be added by users who is given privilege to approve posts.

No need to do so. If approvers reject an image because of bad anatomy, they can easily mark it as 'Poor Quality' or give a 'Detailed Rejection' Message.

Username_Hidden said:

It could also be a pool since it seems to be subjective.

There's nothing subjective about, say, a character's forearm being in completely the wrong place for the angle of the upper arm

This tag shouldn't be subjective at all, except possibly with regards to where to draw the boundary between adding it and not. And that is something that's subjective for most tags on the site.

I completely agree with skylightcrystal's comment. I don't think there's as much subjectivity to the tag as is being made out, and I'm glad it exists for me to blacklist posts that slip by the moderation queue.

That aside, the point brought up in the OP's last paragraph I can get behind. I think the bad anatomy implication could be removed from anatomical nonsense for it to become more of a comedy tag, similar to you gonna get raped vs imminent rape. This would be used for cases where the author obviously never intended a serious depiction of anatomy, such as post #3302817.

Obstetrics said:

I completely agree with skylightcrystal's comment. I don't think there's as much subjectivity to the tag as is being made out, and I'm glad it exists for me to blacklist posts that slip by the moderation queue.

That aside, the point brought up in the OP's last paragraph I can get behind. I think the bad anatomy implication could be removed from anatomical nonsense for it to become more of a comedy tag, similar to you gonna get raped vs imminent rape. This would be used for cases where the author obviously never intended a serious depiction of anatomy, such as post #3302817.

I agree that the bad_* tags are all incredibly useful for categorizing and archiving actual mistakes on the part of the artist relating to anatomy. Things like post #4170703 benefit from having the tags. The problem is that all of those tags are filled to the brim with things with no immediately discernable flaw, or flaws so incredibly minor that if those posts were the standard, far more images on the site would be getting tagged bad anatomy.

The tags, at least in my opinion, are being used too frivolously, and could use some serious cleaning up. They're not useful at all right now for finding actual anatomical mistakes, because users will just stick them on anything they think looks a bit off. It starts to become a problem when you have to convince other people that a tag belongs there at all.

I do agree with most of the sentiments in this thread regarding tags like bad anatomy, bad proportions, and anatomical_nonsense. But I'm going to echo this one in particular:

blindVigil said:

I agree that the bad_* tags are all incredibly useful for categorizing and archiving actual mistakes on the part of the artist relating to anatomy. Things like post #4170703 benefit from having the tags. The problem is that all of those tags are filled to the brim with things with no immediately discernable flaw, or flaws so incredibly minor that if those posts were the standard, far more images on the site would be getting tagged bad anatomy.

The tags, at least in my opinion, are being used too frivolously, and could use some serious cleaning up. They're not useful at all right now for finding actual anatomical mistakes, because users will just stick them on anything they think looks a bit off. It starts to become a problem when you have to convince other people that a tag belongs there at all.

I'm in full agreement here. There can be actual applications of such tags, in the case of real mistakes. Those are actually worth pointing out. However, the usage has strayed from the original intentions.

Using any of bad_* tags in the simple logic of "big breasts/big butt, that's a bad anatomy/bad proportions..." or minor flaws that don't ruin the entire picture as some users seem to have done is not helpful at all and is counterproductive from a tagging standpoint. Using the tags while not taking the artist's general style into account like with post #3846168 or ignoring context (it's entirely possible a character is just intended to be curvy in some fashion) is even less productive.

This shouldn't even have to be said, but there should be nuance involved with the usage of a set of tags that are pointing out one or multiple issues with the technical aspects of the picture. It's clear from this thread alone that there's been issues with how the tags are applied, so a cleanup is in order.

Obstetrics said:

I completely agree with skylightcrystal's comment. I don't think there's as much subjectivity to the tag as is being made out, and I'm glad it exists for me to blacklist posts that slip by the moderation queue.

That aside, the point brought up in the OP's last paragraph I can get behind. I think the bad anatomy implication could be removed from anatomical nonsense for it to become more of a comedy tag, similar to you gonna get raped vs imminent rape. This would be used for cases where the author obviously never intended a serious depiction of anatomy, such as post #3302817.

That's a much better use of the tag, especially as the "nonsense" does carry the implication of the artist clearly never intending to be realistic in the first place.

skylightcrystal said:

There's nothing subjective about, say, a character's forearm being in completely the wrong place for the angle of the upper arm

Oh, these tags definitely don't have have to be subjective. I wanted to mention this in my OP, but I had so much difficulty finding examples of the tags being used right that I forgot about it.

Obstetrics said:

I completely agree with skylightcrystal's comment. I don't think there's as much subjectivity to the tag as is being made out, and I'm glad it exists for me to blacklist posts that slip by the moderation queue.

The issue is that the tags are currently being used in a very subjective manner that renders them useless for their objective purposes. If you blacklist them, you will miss out on some posts with gigantic breasts simply because certain users don't like that theme. You will also miss out on a number of posts where the bad anatomy or proportions is all but imperceptible.

(Of course, there already is a tag for users to blacklist if they don't want to see gigantic breasts. It's called gigantic breasts.)

Apollyon said:

Using any of bad_* tags in the simple logic of "big breasts/big butt, that's a bad anatomy/bad proportions..." ... is not helpful at all and is counterproductive from a tagging standpoint.

It's also a double standard: when judged solely by the criterion of anatomical correctness, a lot of the T&A uploaded to this site really is rather questionable. But even more questionable are chibis—they're called "super deformed" for a reason!—yet we never see the bad_* tags applied to chibi art for large heads or eyes alone (the latter of which is, of course, far more than just a chibi thing).

This is because we understand that art does not need to be anatomically correct to be good art. Tagging exaggerated T&A as bad anatomy anyway says, "I dislike these exaggerations enough that I will in this case selectively apply the value judgment that art should be realistic and unexaggerated, despite previously being perfectly fine with cartoon characters with a head-to-body ratio of 3."

Now that I think about it, bad_anatomy definitely needs to be redefined: "anatomically incorrect" is all the wiki says.

The anatomical nonsense tag has zero usage with the way it is now. It serves no purpose other than more egregious bad anatomy which is pointless. You have flags for those (even even then, the existence of the bad anatomy shouldn't make an image immune to being flagged).

So, what's the bad anatomy tag's purpose? It is to blacklist images that fall under this.

For example, I would tag the four example images with "bad anatomy" every day of the week. There is something off in every of these, even within the artist's specific style, like, misplaced breasts and elongated body on post #3846168 for the right girl when compared to the left girl. There is a glaring inconsistency in the artwork itself).

And if you don't want to see that, you should always be able to blacklist that specific image from an artist. I think that's a very genuine usage of tag that makes sense:

Point out inconsistencies in the artist's own style and then add the tag if the inconsistency is bad enough (like here). It doesn't ruin the image completely (hence, no flag) but it is still a visual component of an image, and therefore, should be tagged as such. Adding the tag by itself shouldn't be interpreted as an attack against the image itself.
Would I also add the tag if the right girl was alone? I'd say yes because inconsistencies aren't all since the artist clearly intended to draw a "normally" proportioned character but something got messed up and you should be allowed to blacklist such instances.

So I want to ask: What is the goal of this topic? If it's simply a rework of the wiki: I completely agree here. The current wiki is absolutely not helpful.
It seems pretty much impossible to find a common ground here but I think all of us can agree that anatomical nonsense serves no purpose and should be re-defined entirely.

But when it comes to application of the tag: I don't see much reason to change that. The tag is already super rare (8k) and, although it is a small sample size, I can see something off in every image in the thumbnail on the first page. If at all, I would say the tag is underused.

Agreed with the idea to adjust anatomical nonsense to make it used for instances where the artist is clearly playing loose with anatomy.

One key criteria I would suggest to include for the redefinition would be the artists deliberate choice to mess with anatomy (for humorous effect), rather than an anatomical mistake or oversight.

For example post #2995838, I would probably remove bad anatomy and bad proportions

------

As for bad anatomy itself, there are many posts in there that should be bad perspective and bad proportions instead.

bad perspective when there is a foreshortening mistake causing a certain part of the body to be longer or shorter than it should in order for the perspective to work, but the anatomy would be fine if the artist was not going hard on perspective. Or if it is a close-up to a particular part (crotch, feet and ass) where the other half of the body in the background is not at the right side or position.

bad proportions when the artist clearly has a good grasp of anatomy but deliberately chose to exaggerate body parts (breasts, ass, legs) for whatever reason. For comparison, we have long legs and thick thighs that cover a specific exaggerated body part and yet it doesn't fall under the scrutiny of bad proportions. As long as the sizes don't fall into hyper territory and the artist put some thought into the physical consequences of these proportions.

Bad anatomy should be used for artistic mistakes from a lack of grasp of anatomy, not for conscious decisions by an artist who knows what they are doing.

And if these tags give off a subjective quality to their usage because they start off with the word 'bad', then perhaps they should be renamed along with their redefinition instead of getting rid of them altogether. For example, we have impossible clothes, which cover the same issue as bad anatomy but for clothing.

If we want to nail down the objective usage and qualifier for anatomy, I'd so go for impossible anatomy, exaggerated proportions and perspective error to be as direct as possible and to eliminate any hint of overlap with subjective sense.

Squishy said:

If we want to nail down the objective usage and qualifier for anatomy, I'd so go for impossible anatomy, exaggerated proportions and perspective error to be as direct as possible and to eliminate any hint of overlap with subjective sense.

+1 on renaming them.

Guaro1238 said:

+1 on renaming them.

Ditto

Provence said:

But when it comes to application of the tag: I don't see much reason to change that. The tag is already super rare (8k) and, although it is a small sample size, I can see something off in every image in the thumbnail on the first page. If at all, I would say the tag is underused.

I really can't agree less. Many of those images are so innocuous looking I probably wouldn't believe you even if you explained what was wrong with them. What's wrong with post #4200309? They look no different from the other 3mil+ images on the site to me. I genuinely believe that if we held the tag to your apparently strict standards, no offense intended, the idea of what is and is not "bad anatomy" would become way too unreasonable, possibly reaching into perfectionism. The tag is already flooded to the point of debatable usefulness, flooding it even more definitely doesn't help.

That said, while I believe bad anatomy is overused, I feel that other tags that could narrow down the specific flaw(s) are extremely underused. bad_anatomy ~bad_leg ~bad_arm ~bad_ass ~bad_feet ~bad_vulva ~long_legs ~long_arms ~small_head ~small_hands only counts 538 posts. I sincerely doubt the other 8.3k posts exclusively consist of images with flaws that don't fall into any of these categories. It would certainly help to have a hint of just what the flaw is, that's at least better than everyone scratching their heads looking for it.

Squishy said:

bad proportions when the artist clearly has a good grasp of anatomy but deliberately chose to exaggerate body parts (breasts, ass, legs) for whatever reason. For comparison, we have long legs and thick thighs that cover a specific exaggerated body part and yet it doesn't fall under the scrutiny of bad proportions. As long as the sizes don't fall into hyper territory and the artist put some thought into the physical consequences of these proportions.

I question the value of this definition. The percentage of posts on the site that don't exaggerate proportions somehow or another must be vanishingly small. Exaggeration is almost essential to the manga art style itself. Large eyes, for example, are so ubiquitous that the big eyes tag is almost unused. We'd be better off with a tag for realistic proportions (which as it turns out are already part of the criteria for the realistic tag).

Provence said:

But when it comes to application of the tag: I don't see much reason to change that. The tag is already super rare (8k) and, although it is a small sample size, I can see something off in every image in the thumbnail on the first page. If at all, I would say the tag is underused.

I'll echo blindVigil's sentiment. I can hardly see anything wrong with those images either. You can say, "Oh, the tag isn't intended as an attack on the art or the artist!" but that isn't the problem. The problem is that many of the flaws you say you're seeing are completely imperceptible to us. We really, sincerely cannot tell they are there at all. This means that there is confusion and disagreement over which images the tag applies to.

Conclusion: the tag has all the same problems as a subjective tag, even if there are objective criteria behind it.

Oryuu said:

I'll echo blindVigil's sentiment. I can hardly see anything wrong with those images either. You can say, "Oh, the tag isn't intended as an attack on the art or the artist!" but that isn't the problem. The problem is that many of the flaws you say you're seeing are completely imperceptible to us. We really, sincerely cannot tell they are there at all. This means that there is confusion and disagreement over which images the tag applies to.

Conclusion: the tag has all the same problems as a subjective tag, even if there are objective criteria behind it.

That is simply not correct.
If you want, you can always ask why there is this tag.

However, simply because you can't, or perhaps, don't want to see it shouldn't mean that the tag is not applicable, especially if you happen to receive an explanation in case of confusion.
That means that there are objective criteria to use on a tag and they can be explained. Therefore, the tag itself is objective.

There are multiple tags with subjectivity behind them despite being based on objective criterias. Size tags are a good example for that as not everyone uses small/medium/large tags the same but they still tend to go in the right direction.
Same with "bad anatomy", the only difference here is the negative connotation the tag has but everytime the tag is applied you should be able to see where the tagger is coming from (if not it's just vandalism and that applies to every tag), especially after an explanation but ending up with a blurry line is common for every tag.

Provence said:

That is simply not correct.
If you want, you can always ask why there is this tag.

You can ask, but you'll almost never receive a response, so why bother?

Same with "bad anatomy", the only difference here is the negative connotation the tag has but everytime the tag is applied you should be able to see where the tagger is coming from

I seriously question that assumption. I mean, you said you would "tag the four example images with 'bad anatomy' every day of the week". If it is, as you said, an objective tag, can you state exactly what's wrong with post #3597249. Or, as you said about post #3846168.

elongated body

You know different people have different proportions in real life? She's taller, and it's natural to assume she'd have a longer body in general.

elongated body

You'll have to be more specific about that, because I definitely see nothing of the sort.

That's the kind of problem I see with the tag -- most of the time, it's just used as an "extra downvote" for images the user didn't like and don't want other people to like, and then rationalize some ad-hoc explanation.

Oryuu said:

Subjectivity

The second issue is that these tags sometimes seem to get subjectively applied to what is clearly intended as deliberate stylistic exaggeration:

Quite. Despite being a traditionalist myself, I find it annoying to see Bad Anatomy shoved on images where the artist themself is merely trying to express a different style. Though detesting Cubism, it is as valid as any other if that's what pleases the maker.

And anyone thinking the Matter of Danbooru is essentially naturalistic, has issues.

Assuming taggers have bad faith right off the bat isn't going to get us anywhere productive. That said, there's definitely some issues that deserve discussion.

I support tag cleanup in cases where the image is clearly stylized or any flaws are minor - I think we are all in agreement that those cases are not in the spirit of the tags at all. In cases where you're genuinely not sure whether a tag belongs, messaging the original tagger for clarification is a good idea (and then using your own judgement based on their response or lack thereof). On top of that, I think we should encourage more liberal use of specific body part/error tags going forward in order to mitigate the issues people have with the current tags not being descriptive enough. Tags should be easier to use than comments in this case, and less likely to be obtrusive or cause fighting.

Tentative +1 for renaming as well, but trying to redefine any of the tags away from objective errors probably isn't the right path. Maybe something like *_error for a name scheme.